Audiology, NHS and Healthcare publications

Joint Strategic Needs Assessment for Hearing Loss (JSNA)

NHS England has published its Joint Strategic Needs Assessment (JSNA) guide for hearing loss. The guide has been created by NHS England, the Local Government Association, the Association of Directors of Public Health, Public Health England, and a range of public health leads. The BAA has been involved in this work with our partners at the Hearing Loss and Deafness Alliance. The BAA welcomes this long overdue publication.

The Hearing Loss Joint Strategic Needs Assessment (JSNA) guide presents evidence on the prevalence and impact of hearing loss and should be used alongside NHS England’s Commissioning Services for People with Hearing Loss: A Framework for Clinical Commissioning Groups which was published in 2016. Together, these two key outputs of the Action Plan on Hearing Loss, aim to support local authorities and NHS commissioners to meet their statutory duties to assess the needs of local populations, take account of health inequalities, advance equality and commission high-quality services to meet local hearing needs and improve public health.

The JSNA should be used in conjunction with the documents on what works. The JSNA and other documents can be accessed here.

NHS Reports

The BAA provides below all the recent reports and publications from the NHS, NHS Scotland and NHS Wales and NHS Northern Ireland as a central resource of documentation relevant to your department or practice. A list of useful NHS website links can also be found below.

BIHIMA publications

The British Irish Hearing Instrument Manufacturers Association (BIHIMA) represents in Britain and Ireland the world’s leading hearing instrument manufacturers. They work in partnership with other professionals, trade, regulatory and consumer organisations within the health care and charitable sectors. Our goal is to raise consumer awareness of hearing solutions, making available the very latest in hearing technology.

Every quarter, BIHIMA collates sales data from British and Irish hearing instrument manufacturers. These are analysed and released in their quarterly reviews.

Useful NHS Links

The Academy for Healthcare Science was established in shadow form at the beginning of 2011, and an Interim Chief Executive was appointed soon after this.

The high-level ambitions for the Academy were set out as follows:

Define high quality education and training standards across the UK HCS workforce and improve patient outcomes by ensuring that the standards are promulgated and met.

Enable effective professional engagement in the ongoing development, and review of national curricula for the UK HCS workforce, across the career framework

The Academy for Healthcare Science is the first Register for the healthcare science workforce to be accredited by the Professional Standards Authority for Health and Social Care.

The Accreditation quality mark signifies that the Academy has meet the Professional Standards Authority’s high standards in governance, standard-setting, education and training, management of the register, complaints handling and information; assuring the public and employers.

BAA feel it is important that all services are equally reflected on the NHS choices website and felt it important that this information is shared.

Subsequent contact with the site gave the following information on how to get your service onto the website and how to ensure updates to services are accurate.

“The Hearing Aid Services dataset is published on NHS Choices through data provided by Serco for the Department of Health. Please send these, and all future changes, direct to nhschoicesupdates@serco.com who will update all related datasets.

These will feed through to NHS Choices as part of our regular data feeds and will be updated on the site.

Please note that this can take up to 4 weeks from original submission.”

The following gives detail on how to ensure your Service is represented on NHS Choices and I would suggest you:

The final version of the Specification for the accessible information standard, the Implementation Guidance and supporting documents are published on the NHS England Website

The accessible information standard tells organisations how they should ensure that disabled patients / service users and, where appropriate, carers and parents, receive information in formats that they can understand, and that they receive appropriate support to help them to communicate.

July 08, 2015

Changes to the Referral to Treatment (RTT) operational standards and reporting arrangements.

Simon Stevens wrote on 4 June 2015 to let you know that he had accepted Sir Bruce Keogh’s recommendations on improvements to current waiting time standards and reporting arrangements. This letter sets out the operational arrangements required to enact these changes.

RTT
The admitted and non-admitted operational standards are being abolished, and the incomplete standard will become our sole measure of patients’ constitutional right to start treatment within 18 weeks.

This means that from the date of this letter (24th June 2015), no provider or commissioner will receive any form of sanction, whether in the form of regulator investigation/intervention or the levying of financial sanctions, for failing the admitted or non-admitted standards.

2016 marks 10 years since the roll out of newborn hearing screening in England.

Most babies born deaf are identified within a few weeks through screening and getting support right from the start has been shown to transform the language and communications skills of deaf babies.

This report celebrates 10 years of universal new born hearing screening in England. As you may know, the National Deaf Children’s Society took a lead in campaigning for this programme to be introduced. It is clear that the programme has transformed the lives of many children born deaf but, 10 years on, there is still much to do to make sure that high quality early years support is in place following diagnosis. http://www.ndcs.org.uk/right_from_the_start.html